It took a great deal of trial and error to figure out a few things.

First of all, altering existing star-paper wasn't possible. Or at least, it wasn't possible at my skill level. When I tried to make the already-created star paper better, it disintegrated. Maybe I could do it someday, but for now, the paper was not capable of handling shaping from me.

After that, we tried using illusions to recreate the night sky, and then having Felix bind that to the paper. It did away with the absurd setup that Felix had been using to mimic the night sky.

It actually worked a lot better than Felix and I had been expecting. The resulting piece of paper was a marked improvement over Felix’s first product. Anise estimated that it was about a quarter as useful as the real night sky. Nowhere near ideal, but still an improvement. It was a hint that we were going in the right direction.

Finally, we tried using my shaping magic to mess with the light inside of Felix’s crazy setup. I took the lamp light, and then tried to twist it towards my idea of ‘starlight'. It was messy, but after pushing a bunch of my alteration essence into the light, I felt something twist. Felix grabbed hold of it with his binding essence and affixed it to the paper, and we handed the paper to Anise for evaluation.

After a quick test, she grinned.

"Better than the last test!" She said. "Nearly half as efficient as real starlight!"

Felix sagged in disappointment. "Only half? I was expecting much more than that. How can we improve it?"

Anise scratched her head, and looked at the paper. "Half efficiency is already way more than I was expecting. I really appreciate you two helping at all. If I can sneak in a little starlight absorption during the day, I'll increase my efficiency by a lot..."

"But it's nowhere near as good," said Felix, shaking his head.

Even though I wasn't a craftsman, I was inclined to agree with Felix. The idea that Anise was barely getting half efficiency out of our best product rankled at me. Anise had mentioned, at one point in time, that she wanted to see what happened if she took different ‘concepts’ of starlight and used them. She was also going to need as many spell constellations as possible. The world was densely populated and in the midst of an industrial revolution. If Anise wanted a keyword ability, she needed to do something amazing. I wanted her to have every single tool available for that. Half efficiency just wasn't going to cut it.

I took a closer look at the best prototype we had made so far.

The paper seemed better than the other few results. It emitted a healthier glow, and it almost looked like real starlight. But it still felt like there was something off about it.

“Anise, do have any idea what we did wrong?” I asked, after a few moments. "I know that a half efficiency paper is better than nothing, but... I really want to make these pieces of paper better. And I was also hoping you would get something out of using different conceptualizations of starlight. But right now, our star paper barely even works."

Anise frowned, and picked up the paper again, before she closed her eyes. She spent a lot longer thinking about her response this time. Finally, she opened her eyes again.

“It just… doesn’t feel like real starlight,” she said, frowning. “I don’t have any way of detecting ‘concepts,’ so I’m just guessing here. But your idea of starlight could be off? Or maybe I only need a specific kind of starlight? I mean, there are different kinds of stars… so we could try experimenting with that. Maybe I only need stars from green wanderers or something. I don’t know,” she said, finally.

“Hmm…” Felix said as he rubbed at his chin in thought. “I thought for sure that Miria’s help would perfect it. Are we missing something? Maybe we need better materials for the paper? Since the paper is acting as a container for the concept of 'starlight,' we could try making it more... star-like.” He sighed, and shook his head. “The nice thing about paper is that it’s cheap, and as a kid in school it’s pretty normal to carry around. But we could also try something else. Stars are made out of gas, so we could try that? But I have no idea how Anise could even carry around gas . What are we supposed to do, bottle it up?” He looked thoughtful at that. "You know, Anise only needs access to the light. Bottling up the gas might work..."

“I don’t think that would be very practical,” said Anise. “I mean, the gas would still need to glow afterwards. And I think most gasses that stars are made of are dangerous. If I want light to emit from the gas, whatever container we use would need to be transparent. I can only think of a glass container. And carrying around dangerous gas in a glowing glass bottle sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

I nodded. “I also don't think that's a great idea. Unless there’s a way to make that several times safer. I don't want Anise to trip, break the container, inhale a bunch of dangerous gas, and then die. That would be a pretty absurd way to return to the Market.”

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Felix nodded. “True. But I can’t figure out what else we can do to improve the star paper. It’s driving me crazy.” He reached to the side, and picked up one of the books he and Anise had checked out from the school library. It was one of the books that detailed how stars were born.

I skimmed the book over his shoulder, to see if there was anything I missed. Maybe my conceptualization of starlight was the problem? I did a bit of quick reading, to figure out how if the book held the missing puzzle piece.

Apparently, stars in this world were born from binding essence linking together a bunch of space dust. This resulted in a larger and larger ball of stuff. Once it reached a massive size, the gravity of the star ignited the whole mess, as long as there was enough gas trapped in the ball of material. The binding essence somehow stabilized the whole mess.

I also learned, with some surprise, that any clump of space dust could become a star in this dimension. All planets were also bundles of space dust held together by binding essence. If they collected enough gas and reached critical mass, they would ignite and become stars. Or at least, that was what astronomers claimed right now.

I wasn’t sure why big things naturally caught fire in this dimension. Was it some sort of side effect of how gravity worked here? Was it a result of some other esoteric dimensional law? I had no way to find out.

I skimmed the book to see if it explained the relationship between gravity and fire, but unfortunately, the book didn't explain that.

"Felix, could we try again? I'm thinking that maybe my idea of how 'starlight' works could influence the result," I said.

We fired up the apparatus again, but the results were disappointing. Anise didn't even notice much of a difference this time. That was considerably less than I had expected to achieve.

After my failed idea, I sighed. I started rifling through the pile of books Felix and Anise had accumulated, but with much less enthusiasm than before.

Felix also sighed in frustration, running his hands through his hair as he fell into thought.

“Maybe we could use gas instead of oil to turn the lamps on?” asked Felix, after a few minutes of thought. “That would make them… closer to real starlight, at least.”

“It’s… worth a shot,” I said, frowning. Anise also thumbed through a few books on stars, but she didn't seem to have any new ideas.

After a few minutes, Felix replaced the lamps, and we tried the experiment again. The result was marginally better… but only by a little bit.

"It's... maybe 55% of the efficiency of real starlight?" she said, after a few moments of concentration. "It's a bit better than the last one, but not by much. But that's okay! I'm grateful to have any way to improve during daylight at all!"

"But it might not be enough for you to get a keyword ability," I said. "I want you to have every advantage we can give you." Anise fell silent, although her expression seemed torn between gratitude and worry.

"If it's too hard, I can work with this, though," she said. "You two have done way more than you needed to."

"Let's keep thinking for a while," Felix said. "There might still be a way to make it better. My pride as a craftsman is at stake now, you know?" he grinned, to let Anise know that he wasn't taking things too seriously. But he still seemed determined to keep improving the paper.

So we fell into thought.

“I just don’t know,” said Felix, after several minutes. He scowled at the night sky. “The concept of starlight in the ritual setup didn’t feel perfect, but it felt like I was on the right track. It should have been better than 55%.”

“Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way?” asked Anise. “I mean… actually, is there anything stopping us from modifying the paper once it’s already created?”

“We already tried that, didn’t we?” I said. “The paper disintegrated. I mean, I could keep practicing...”

“Not you, Miria,” said Anise.

A moment later, I realized what Anise was suggesting. I blinked in surprise.

Was it even possible for alchemists to mess with an affixation after it was made? I turned towards Felix to see if he knew.

“Well, once you affix something, it’s pretty much set in stone,” said Felix. “After all, you’ve taken a foreign concept and welded it to a chunk of physical matter. Physical matter can only handle so much foreign conceptual stuff before it implodes. In the past, Alchemists have welded concepts onto an item at the same time, but that’s beyond my skill level. And we would need better materials, too.”

“So there’s a limit on affixation?” I asked.

“You can think of each piece of physical matter as something like a cup. Each concept I add to it fills the cup up. Once I overfill it, the cup explodes. Better alchemists can make a concept without adding quite as much liquid to the cup. And better materials work as bigger cups - more like a bucket. And once an affixation is 'set,' it solidifies. Kind of like ice,” he said.

“Well… that’s the case for physical matter, yeah,” said Anise, carefully. “But… I mean, I don’t know much about affixation, since we haven’t gotten to that in class yet. But what if you tried… I don’t know, binding a concept to a concept? Would that even be possible? Using the affixation itself as a container for another affixation? Kind of like one of those dolls with more dolls inside of it? If you did that, you could just keep binding the concept of starlight to the concept of starlight over and over again. It seems ridiculous, but maybe it would work?"

“Well, that’s obviously… huh.” Said Felix, blinking. “Binding a concept to a concept. It’s possible to bind physical matter to other physical matter. It’s also possible to bind concepts to physical matter. I don’t know of anyone who has ever successfully bound a concept to a concept but… Hmm…” Felix looked more and more thoughtful, until he started grinning. “I don’t know if anyone has ever tried that before. It sounds ridiculous, but… maybe it’s possible?” He turned towards me.

“If it works I know what I’m doing to get my keyword ability!”